The guest speaker was ASRock’s Marketing Director Chris Lee, who gave a short presentation on the lineup and features of the new Intel 8-series motherboards.

Highlight of the night was Z87 OC Formula, which is ASRock’s top motherboard for Haswell enthusiasts. Designed by in-house overclocking legend Nick Shih, the Z87 OC Formula has conformal coating over the PCB (to protect against short circuits when there is a liquid-cooler leak), OLED debug display, 4-way multi-GPU support and a comprehensive bios for fine-grained tweaking (including Nick Shih’s own expert profile settings).

Next on show were the Intel 8-series Fatal1ty branded gaming boards (Z87 Professional and H87 Performance). Both offerings feature a Creative Sound Blaster Core3D audio chipset and three months licence for XSplit Broadcaster software (live streaming and in-game recording functions)

ASRock also showed off a couple of their mainstream and business-oriented motherboards including a very desirable mini-ITX model (Z87E-ITX). Most of the boards come with ASRock’s Purity Sound solution which consists of a dedicated PCB trace path for the audio signals, shielded Realtek ALC1150 codec (115dB SNR) and a pair of TI NE5562 opamps.